Paper short abstract:

This paper endeavours to reconcile idealist phenomenologies of digital mediation with materialist ontologies of worshipful communities of Shi'i Muslims in the context of devotional poems broadcasted online and recited in Urdu with a natively digital framework inclusive of Shi'i digital experiences.

Paper long abstract:

In the holy periods of Ashura and Arba’in, Shi’i Muslims commemorate the martyrs of the Battle of Karbala (Umayyad Caliphate, now Iraq, 61 AH/680 CE). Ruffle (2021) finds these commemorations to be “intersensorial.” However, scholars routinely conclude that technological mediation "decays" (Benjamin 1935), “numbs” (McLuhan 1964), “amputates" and "reduces” (Kittler 1968), or “closes off” (Lupton and Maslen 2018) sensoria. Paradoxically, Rahimi and Amin (2020) observe digital forms of Shi'i commemoration. This presentation outlines an attempt to reconcile this paradox through theoretical tools that permit "natively digital" methods (Rogers 2013). It considers an expression of digital bereavement in which the whole sensorium is activated, animated, and entangled: the videos of Royall Records, led by Nadeem Sarwar and founded in Pakistan. This presentation conceives of these videos and evidence of their varied reception as "digital artefacts" (e.g., Beigl et al. 2002) and their producers and interlocutors, not as "digital subjects" whose bodies express gestures that are received as "incomplete" (Goriunova 2019), but as "cyborgs" (Haraway 1991) whose bodies have been "recalibrating to a new political and technological order" for decades (Hirschkind 2006). An elaboration of digital intersensoriality can challenge idealist and techno-determinist views of digitality, in which the digital is held, contradictorily, to be at once a "virtual" and "simulated" (i.e., immaterial) other and a tangible “distancing” barrier (Richardson 2011). In contrast, this article posits “digital atmospheres” as a means to articulate their materiality and describe how bodies come together in ways which accurately account for the digital experience explicated by Shi'as.